U.S. foreign assistance to Africa: securing America's investment for lasting development.

• Author: Almquist, Katherine J.
• Position: Report

Since 2001, the United States has dramatically increased its commitment to development in Africa and has transformed the way it is implemented. In the last eight years, U.S. foreign assistance to sub-Saharan Africa managed by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has increased by $5.5 billion, or 340 percent. (1) An additional $3.8 billion has been provided through Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) compacts, ten of which have been signed with sub-Saharan African countries since 2004. (2) The United States is currently on track to meet its 2005 G-8 commitment to double aid to Africa again by 2010. (3) This commitment of financial resources by the United States represents former President George W. Bush's vision of using America's power to help Africans improve their own lives, build their own nations and transform their own future.

Country ownership, good governance, accountability for results and the importance of economic growth have all been hallmark themes of the Bush era of new approaches to international development, and threads of all can be seen in the United States' foreign assistance to Africa. Indeed, with U.S. assistance, Africa is making progress toward addressing key development challenges, particularly in the health sector where significant gains have been made in combating the scourge of HIV/AIDS. Additionally, Africa is addressing the incidence of malaria, a significant source of mortality on the continent. Yet if these important successes, along with many others, are to endure and further progress is to be made, then a much more strategic and holistic development approach to Africa is needed. This development approach would build on the commitments and innovations begun during the Bush administration.

U.S. foreign aid to Africa is presently the sum of both executive and legislative signature or so-called earmarked programs that, albeit well-intentioned, often fail to address the most critical development challenges in Africa because of their single-issue focus and constituency-driven mandates. In order for the United States to avoid falling into the foreign aid trap of endless social service delivery, it needs to comprehensively retool its efforts to marshal Africa's own natural and human resources to power its way out of poverty and underdevelopment. Official development assistance will never be the answer, but it can help unlock the solutions.

This article will examine how the United States can achieve greater development impact in Africa with its foreign assistance dollars. The Bush administration has elevated the prominence of Africa in foreign policy and national security arenas and dedicated unprecedented levels of aid to meeting the continent's humanitarian and development challenges. The Obama administration has already signaled its intentions to keep aid levels high, yet budgetary pressures in our current economic climate and other pressing foreign policy priorities will push against sustaining the United States' level of commitment, much less to go beyond and do more to meet the serious challenges still impeding developmental progress in Africa The Obama administration's ability to rise to this challenge rests on more than additional resources and new initiatives. It will require a new strategic approach that addresses the longer-term challenges confronting Africa, in the context of U.S. interests--a more peaceful, stable and productive Africa. The Bush administration has raised the bar exponentially on the U.S. commitment to Africa. The Obama administration must now not only deliver on these commitments, but go much further to secure a peaceful, stable and productive Africa.

PROGRESS DURING THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION

Looking back on the Bush administration's record in Africa, one can see that many positive developments have taken place over the past eight years. Beyond more than tripling assistance to Africa, many important programs have been launched and new approaches taken that have transformed U.S. engagement with Africa and produced impressive results.

Africa has been such a priority of the Bush administration that no less than twelve presidential initiatives, in whole or in substantial part, helped to focus resources and energies on Africa. (4) Bush-era foreign assistance to Africa supported each objective of the U.S. foreign assistance framework. These include working with African governments, institutions and organizations to promote peace and security, just and democratic governance, investment in people, economic growth and humanitarian assistance.

In the area of peace and security, the Bush administration contributed to the ending of seven conflicts in Africa (Liberia, Sierra Leone, north-south Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, Burundi and Kenya) and devoted substantial energies to those still outstanding, admittedly albeit with mixed results and much more work required (Darfur-Chad, Somalia, Ethiopia-Eritrea, northern Uganda and eastern Congo). In addition, some 40,000 African peacekeepers have been trained by the United States since 2005. (5)

Perhaps most visibly, in 2007, President Bush announced the creation of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) to reorganize the Department of Defense's disjointed engagement with Africa from three combatant commands with responsibilities on the African continent to one integrated command. Unfortunately, confusion and miscommunication over the role and purpose of this new command undermined the reception it should have received from both African and American stakeholders alike. The reception should have been one that appreciated the inherent good sense and rationale in this restructuring and acknowledged the opportunity for more focused and effective military-to-military support in the critical realm of security sector reform in Africa. This goal is finally being articulated and increasingly perceived in this manner, but time and effort will still be required to allay these early misgivings and prove AFRICOM's positive place in the United States' approach to Africa.

In support of just and democratic governance, the United States has encouraged participatory politics and human rights throughout Africa. In the past four years alone, more than fifty democratic elections have been held in Africa, and more than two-thirds of sub-Saharan African nations are now characterized as at least partially free. (6) Even in ongoing, difficult environments like Zimbabwe, successful democracy and governance programming has made a crucial difference to the course of the political crisis there in 2007 through 2008. Parallel vote tabulation conducted by civic groups supported by USAID enabled quick and transparent reporting of voting results in the March 2008 election, showing that the opposition candidate Morgan Tsvangirai beat incumbent President Robert Mugabe despite manipulation of the official results by the government. While this outcome was ultimately not respected, the rapid and transparent posting of voting results gave the opposition the ability and legitimate standing to contest the official results with the backing of the international community. (7)

The United States has also been instrumental in fighting corruption, for instance through Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) threshold programs designed to help countries close to MCA compact eligibility but falling short on the critical corruption indicator. The United States has also provided targeted support to programs like the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative and the Kimberly Process to curtail the sale of conflict diamonds. (8) Anti-corruption training for journalists and non-governmental monitors in Tanzania, funded by USAID and the Millennium Challenge Corporation, helped root out a corruption scheme that resulted in the downfall of several ministers in 2008.

The largest proportion of U.S. foreign assistance to Africa during the Bush years was devoted to an area called "investing in people." This funding supported health and education initiatives. Unquestionably the signature program of the Bush administration, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), in its first five years provided an unprecedented $18.8 billion of assistance in support of prevention, care and treatment for HIV/AIDS primarily in Africa, and has been reauthorized for a further $39 billion over the next five years. When it was first announced in 2003, only 50,000 HIV-infected Africans were receiving antiretroviral treatments. By 2008, more than 2 million people were on life-saving drug treatments, most of them in Africa. (9) The President's Malaria Initiative can claim similarly impressive results. Since its launch in 2006, more than 4 million insecticide-treated bed nets and more than 7.4 million malaria-fighting arteminisin therapies have been distributed. All told, more than 25 million people have been assisted and in some areas, such as Zanzibar, a survey of health centers showed that the transmission of malaria had precipitously declined from 2005 to 2007. (10)

Education has also been a key focus for both the Bush administration and Congress. Several initiatives were launched to expand access to and quality of education in Africa, in addition to ongoing programs in basic education. Through the Africa Education Initiative, more than 375,000 scholarships have been provided to African girls, nearly 730,000 teachers and school administrators have been trained and more than 9 million textbooks and learning materials have been provided since 2002. (11)

While approximately three-quarters of U.S. core development assistance to Africa was dedicated to health programming, promoting economic growth was still a central theme of the Bush administration. (12) Key programs and initiatives focused on:

* Increasing agricultural productivity and growth rates to reduce hunger, alleviate poverty and improve food security;

* Promoting African...